Cinema
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Marguerite Duras *IV 4 1914 — The Life You Give
Marguerite Duras, born April 4, 1914, in Gia Dinh, Cochinchina, Vietnam, is the novelist, screenwriter, scenarist, playwright, and film director, internationally known for her screenplays of Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and India Song (1975). The novel L’Amant (1984; The Lover; film, 1992) won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1984. Duras spent most of her childhood…
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Volker Schlöndorff *III 31 1939 — The Life You Give
Volker Schlöndorff, born March 31, 1939, in Wiesbaden, Germany, is a film director and screenwriter who was a leading member of the postwar cinema movement in West Germany. Schlöndorff studied filmmaking in Paris, serving as an assistant to directors Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Pierre Melville. After directing several projects for French television in the…
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Nagisa Ōshima *III 31 1932 — The Life You Give
Nagisa Oshima’s interest in politics began at a young age. His father, a government official (reportedly of samurai lineage) who died when Oshima was six, left behind an extensive library of Socialist and Communist texts, which the young man read through as he came to maturity. He attended Kyoto University, studying law while dabbling in…
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Akira Kurosawa *III 23 1910 — The Life You Give
Kurosawa Akira, born March 23, 1910, in Tokyo, Japan, was the first Japanese film director to win international acclaim, with such films as Rashomon (1950), Ikiru (1952), Seven Samurai (1954), Throne of Blood (1957), Kagemusha (1980), and Ran (1985). Kurosawa’s father, who had once been an army officer, was a teacher who contributed to the…
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Eikoh Hosoe *III 18 1933 — The Life You Give
In his collaborations with influential literary figures and performers, Eikoh Hosoe (born on March 18 1933, in Yonezawa, Yamagata, Japan) is the photographer and filmmaker who created surreal scenes that invoke the fantastic. It is said that the kamaitachi spirit resembles a weasel, rides on a whirlwind, flies through the air, and moves so incredibly…
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David Cronenberg *III 15 1943 / The Life You Give
David Paul Cronenberg, born March 15, 1943, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, is a film director, screenwriter, and actor, best known for movies that employed elements of horror and science fiction to vividly explore the disturbing intersections between technology, the human body, and subconscious desire. Cronenberg graduated from the University of Toronto in 1967 with a…
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Luis Buñuel *II 22 1900 — The Life You Give / La Vida Que Das
Luis Buñuel, born Luis Buñuel Portolés on February 22, 1900, Calanda, Aragón, Spain, is the filmmaker who was a leading figure in Surrealism, the tenets of which suffused both his life and his work. An unregenerate atheist and communist sympathizer who was preoccupied with themes of gratuitous cruelty, eroticism, and religious mania, he won early…
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Jim Jarmush *I 22 1953 — The life you Give
Jim Jarmusch, born January 22, 1953, in Akron, Ohio, is the director and screenwriter whose darkly humorous tone and transcendence of genre conventions established him as a major independent filmmaker. Jarmusch studied at Columbia University and at New York University Film School, where he directed his first feature-length film, Permanent Vacation (1980; released 1986). His…
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David Lynch *I 20 1946 — The Life You Give
David Lynch, born David Keith Lynch, January 20, 1946, Missoula, Montana, U.S.A., is the filmmaker and screenwriter known for his uniquely disturbing and mind-bending visual work. His films juxtapose the cheerfully mundane with the shockingly macabre and often defy explanation. Lynch’s father was a research scientist with the U.S. Forest Service, and the family moved…
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Takeshi Kitano *I 18 1947 — The Life You Give
Kitano Takeshi, born January 18, 1947, in Tokyo, Japan, is the actor, director, writer, and television personality known for his dexterity with both comedic and dramatic material. Kitano was born into a working-class family in Tokyo. He planned to become an engineer but dropped out of college to enter show business in 1972. With his…
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Ousmane Sembene *I 1 (or 8) 1923 – The Life You Give
Ousmane Sembène, born on the 1st, possibly the 8th of January, 1923, in Ziguinchor-Casamance, Senegal, French West Africa, is the writer and film director known for his historical and political themes. Sembène spent his early years as a fisherman on the Casamance coast. He studied at the School of Ceramics at Marsassoum and then moved…
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Jean-Luc Godard *XII 3 1930 — The Life You Give
Jean-Luc Godard, born December 3, 1930, in Paris, France, is the film director who came to prominence with the New Wave group in France during the late 1950s and the ’60s. Godard’s first feature film, À bout de souffle (1960; Breathless), which was produced by François Truffaut, his colleague on the journal Cahiers du cinéma,…
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Martin Scorsese *XI 17 1942 — The Life You Give
Martin Scorsese, born Martin Marcantonio Luciano Scorsese, on November 17, 1942, in Queens, New York, U.S.A., is the filmmaker known for his harsh, often violent depictions of American culture. From the 1970s Scorsese created a body of work that was ambitious, bold, and brilliant. But even his most acclaimed films are demanding, sometimes unpleasantly intense…
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Roberto Benigni *X 27 1952 — The Life You Give
Roberto Benigni, born October 27, 1952, in Misericordia, Arezzo, Italy, is an actor and director known for his comedic work, most notably La vita è bella (1997; Life Is Beautiful), for which he won an Academy Award for best actor. Benigni was the son of a poor tenant farmer who had worked in a German…
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Klaus Kinski *X 18 1926 – The Life You Give
Klaus Kinski, born Klaus Günter Karl Nakszynski on October 18 1926, in Zoppot, Germany [now Sopot, Poland] is the intense, eccentric actor who had a stage and film career of more than 40 years and who was best known for his riveting performances in the films of Werner Herzog. Kinski’s family moved from Poland to…
Sila Blume 